For sure, Perl is not "Unix based". It may have taken some inspiration from tools and paradigms which can be found (also) in Unix, but we are long past that.

It just shows how relative all these lists are.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

Yeah, I sort of scratch my head trying to figure where they come up with some of these lists sometimes, but I figure any time Perl is mentioned as being "important" or "in demand" has GOT to be a good thing. Also, seemed like a bright spot on a Monday morning, Perl getting a mention in the news, even if the accuracy was a little off.

I think it's more than just "some inspiration". For one, there's direct support (in the form of language built-ins) for a multitude of Unix system calls/commands, such as fork, exec, wait, select, kill, lstat, symlink, chmod, chown, getpwnam, etc. - only to name a few.

It are such "absolute truths" which damage our beloved Perl's image, as they do not take into account the very dynamism that lies at its heart.

Other such "truths" which spring to mind are "Perl is CGI", "Perl code is unreadable", "Perl development has stalled", "Perl is dead", ...

At each and every opportunity we must stand united and fight them.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other